Lungi Siqebengu, Neo Masilo and Sipho Dladla joined me in running the stand on 17 September. Lungi is a long time contributor to olpc-za. Neo’s been the IT guy supporting the XO deployment at Kliptown Youth Project and has given a lot of support to One Here One There‘s deployment in Limpopo. Sipho is one of the youth at Kliptown who received an XO in that deployment, so he was able to share personally what the OLPC project has meant to him.

Lungi, Sipho, Morgan, Neo

We had a bunch of XOs, solar panels and an active antenna on show and did many demos with the XOs. The most common question was “Where can I get one?” We had interest from educators, who asked how they can get XOs to their schools, as well as people interested in funding deployments or helping to raise funds. We also had children who came to play…

The children needed no explanation

Neo had a lot of pictures of the recent deployment in Limpopo, so it was great to explain how OLPC is deploying 55000 laptops every month to deployments around the globe but also show the XOs in use in South Africa.

Neo giving a demo

We directed people wanting to get involved to OLPC South Africa which gives contact and mailing list information.

My main problem with this laptop is how very slow it is. It’s true that I am used to faster computers, but that’s not the problem. It’s just really slow. I had to wait two minutes to get onto one application. That’s just a little longer than I can accept. Also, it got slower and slower and slower the longer I went without rebooting it. I had to reboot it all the time.

It was confirmed that the machine reviewed was a B2, and I agree they are very slow, especially with the latest software. I’ve got a B2 and a B4 (much closer to the planned Gen1 version) and did some quick side by side tests to show how much faster it has already been made.

Both machines are running build 542, the Trial 2 milestone build.

Switch on to “home” screen:

B2: 128 seconds

B4: 72 seconds

Launch “Write”, the AbiWord version for Sugar:

B2: 25s

B4: 9s

Launch “Web”, the browser:

B2: 39s

B4: 14s

So fortunately that issue has already been addressed. I was interested to see the opinion of a non-adult on the keyboard:

my favorite part of the computer: the keyboard. It’s green rubber so that dust and water won’t get in under the keys, and this makes the keyboard an awesome thing to type on. Every time you hit a key, it provides a certain amount of satisfaction of how squishy and effortless it is. I just can’t get over that keyboard.

Pretty much all the adults I’ve heard comment on the keyboard disliked both the size of the keys (too small) and the tactile feedback. Great to hear from someone closer to the target audience… Incidently, the B4 keyboards are definitely better than the B2 keyboards – on the B2 I had to press the keys hard to make sure they registered, whereas the B4 picks up my typing without missing letters.

Found a writeup on OLPC, on SA Rocks, with (surprisingly) the video Jason Norwood-Young took of me demonstrating the XO at DFX. Not a very polished demo – I hadn’t had more than a few minutes with the XO and the footage is unedited, but there you go.

It helped that I had already experienced the XO laptop, and seen that the special keys along the top correspond to the function keys, so that I knew F3 gets you to the Home view – otherwise I would have been lost! (F1 to F4 correspond to the icons you see across the top of the frame.)

Icons in the ring show running activities. All the segments look equal to me, but the concept is that the ring is all available memory, and the activities or tasks show how much of this they are using by the amount of the ring they take up. When the ring is full, you need to close something… Maybe the sizing according to memory use isn’t implemented yet.